HOMES OF GREAT MEN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9910, 27 July 1910, Page 2

HOMES OF GREAT MEN.

A PLEA FOR THEIR PRESERVATION.

In an address recently, at the annual meeting of trustees and guardians of Shakespeare's birthplace, Lord Curzen paid it was a very sound instinct of mankind to conserve with great care and reverence places where great men were born and iiv< 1 and died. It was by no means an idle or morbid curio sity snch as we saw too uracil of in tho life of the present day, nor did he think that there was any element of sentimental hero-worship about it. What wo wero really doing was to add to our own knowledge of the, circumstances and surroundings which moulder] their characters, and, if they wero writers, in all probability influenced their writings. When they came, for instance, to a place like that, tho value, of their visit did not merely consist in tho fact that they saw the scenes which Shakespeare saw, or in the case of a painter that they visited the spots which ho might have depicted in his painting?) or if ho were a, writer that ho night havo described in his writings', but that they learned part of tho man himself in the nature which was his daily surroundings, which he absorbed into his being, ar.d was just os much a part of him as that heredi-tarily-acquired entity which came to him at his birth. For instance, any man who went to see the country cottage in which Milton was believed to havo written a part of Paradise Lrrvi;," or who saw in Holland the hut v "i« Peter the Great lived and worki or who visited the house, still «x----i;-.t::ig in the suburbs of London, where the elder Pitt retired when that access of sombre melancholy came over Jnm in tho declining years of his life, and wliero ho had his daily food bunded to him through a partition in the waii, was brought into closer contact and knew more of the individuality of tlioso person, l ; than ho otherwise would do. Ho himself lived for some months when he was Lord Warden of the CliiKiuo Ports in the house, Walmer Castle, where tho Duke of Wellington spent tho greater part of his concluding years and where he died. The death chamber of the Duke of Wellington had a positive effect upon one's understanding of the man. .Rather more than a year ago he took advantage of a holiday that wa;; imposed noon him after an illness to pay a visit to St Helena on purpose to study the surroundings of the last tragic years of tho great Napoleon's life. Visiting tho house at Longwood and tho smroundings, he saw at once that quite one-half, ho thought one might say three-quarters, of what had been written about tho Jfctsfc years of the Emperor Napoleon was utterly falso and wrong, because it had been written i)v men who had not tho slightest conception of the surroundings in which those years wero passed. Half tho details of tho horror of tho surroundings in which he was supposed to ihave eked out the last shabby, deploraolo .years of his existence were blown, to pieces when one saw the beautiful and exquisite character of tho surroundings in which ho was p'aced. He gave those as mete illustration!! of the effect upon one's own knowledge and comprehension of a visit to the localities in which great men lived and died. It is just the sar/10 with our English Shakespeare. Anyone who knew anything. about Shakesneare knew more if ho came there, because he saw in the- house in which Shakesneare was born, in the streets in which ho walked, in the surrounding country scenery which influenced his phraseology and his outlook upo-r., life, something which gave him greater width "of knowledge, greater dentil of eomnrolmnsion, and greater sympathy with tho master whom all of them revered.